Artificial intelligence promises to make starting a business easier than ever. But as traditional careers become less secure, are we confusing opportunity with necessity?
We have spent decades celebrating entrepreneurship as the ultimate expression of personal freedom. Being your own boss, following your passion, building something from scratch. Who wouldn’t want that?
Well, quite a few people, actually.
And as AI begins to change the way we work, I wonder what will happen if entrepreneurship stops being a choice and becomes a necessity.
How I Became an Entrepreneur
For me, becoming an entrepreneur was a choice; a rather expensive one, as it turned out.
Thirty years ago, when my son was born, I had a job that paid $420,000 a year. A wonderful salary, except that my employer was essentially buying my time from nine in the morning until nine at night, weekends included.
And suddenly, time had become more valuable to me than money. I wanted to be with my son. I wanted to be there when he needed me, not just when my calendar allowed it. So I left my job and opened my own advertising agency, which I went on to run for more than 25 years.
I had this rather innocent idea that being my own boss would give me more free time. How sweet.
Of course, I worked even longer hours. The difference was that I could organise them around my children. When they were ill or needed me, I could be there. That freedom was worth a great deal.
And the idea that I would no longer have a boss to answer to? Another charming illusion. Instead of one boss, I had clients. Lots of them. And they, too, were buying my time, my attention and, preferably, my complete devotion.
Still, 25 years in business is a success story. Along the way, I also founded Notorious 13 years ago, and now I’m co-founding a new jewellery company, Hartenstein Diamonds. So I know a thing or two about entrepreneurship. The pleasures, the headaches, the occasional sleepless night when you wonder whether opening a little flower shop might have been a more sensible career choice.
Would I recommend starting a business today, when AI seems to have made everything so much easier?
Well, it depends.
Why Starting a Business Looks So Easy Today
At one point, my advertising agency had 200 employees in two different cities.
Imagine the financial and emotional responsibility of managing all those people. The salaries, the offices, the endless meetings, the occasional crisis. And this was before video conferencing and working from home became part of everyday business life.
Today, my working life looks remarkably different.
At Hartenstein Diamonds, I work with a couple of AI agents and a small group of key people: our business partners and the team at our atelier in Antwerp, whose craftsmanship and expertise are essential to what we do.
My husband and I use AI to help us manage finances, media buying, workflows, market research and customer support. Work that once required several employees or outside specialists can now be handled by a much smaller team.
And there is one particularly attractive advantage to my new AI colleagues. I don’t have to worry whether they will turn up in a good mood tomorrow. Every time I open my AI, I am greeted with a cheerful message: “Hey, Selma. Bereit, loszulegen?” (Ready to get started?) Always ready. Always enthusiastic. Not even a request for a pay rise.
Of course, AI still makes mistakes, and somebody has to check its work. That somebody is usually me. But the difference in what a small business can accomplish is extraordinary. And this is where the great promise of AI comes in.
Perhaps you’ve always loved making ceramics. Or you have a wonderful eye for vintage fashion. Maybe you know more about roses than the average gardener knows about their own children.
Until recently, turning these interests into a business meant finding money, hiring people, learning skills you didn’t have and spending an alarming amount of time on things that had very little to do with your actual passion. Now AI can help you create a website, develop a business plan, write product descriptions, organise your marketing and answer customer enquiries. Suddenly, the distance between having an idea and starting a business has become shorter.
It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Why Easy Doesn’t Mean Simple
There is, however, a small detail that tends to get lost in all this enthusiasm.
AI can help you start a business. It cannot guarantee that anyone will want to buy what you’re selling. Nor can it remove the financial and emotional responsibility of running a company.
You still need judgement, imagination and a certain tolerance for uncertainty. You need to make decisions without knowing whether they are right, invest money you may not recover and deal with problems that have a talent for appearing on Friday afternoons.
And above all, you need persistence. The famous line often attributed to Thomas Edison about failure, I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work, could almost be the unofficial motto of entrepreneurship.
Because sometimes that is precisely what running a business feels like. You try, you fail, you adjust, you try again. And occasionally, just when you think you’ve found the answer, the market changes its mind.
AI may give us better tools, but it cannot give us the temperament to live with uncertainty.
Which brings me to the part of this discussion that worries me.
What If You Don’t Want to Be an Entrepreneur?
Imagine someone who has spent 20 years becoming excellent at their profession. An accountant, a designer, a translator, perhaps someone working in administration. They have built a career, developed expertise, earned the respect of colleagues and found a comfortable rhythm between work and private life.
Then AI arrives. Perhaps their job doesn’t disappear completely, but the company discovers that fewer people can do the same amount of work. And suddenly, this person is told that the future belongs to those who can reinvent themselves.
Start a business! Monetise your hobby! Become your own boss!
But what if they don’t want to?
We have become so enthusiastic about entrepreneurship that we sometimes forget there is enormous dignity in being a good employee.
A brilliant accountant does not need to open an accounting firm to prove their worth. A talented designer does not necessarily want to manage clients, invoices and cash flow. And a wonderful teacher may have absolutely no desire to become an educational content creator.
Some people prefer stability. Others enjoy being part of a team without having to lead it. Some simply want to close their laptops at six, go home, have dinner with their families and forget about work until the following morning. And frankly, why shouldn’t they?
Not everyone has the desire, temperament or the financial circumstances to become an entrepreneur. There is a difference between being capable of doing something and being called to do it. And I worry that, in our enthusiasm for everything AI makes possible, we are forgetting that distinction.
So, What Do We Do?
I am an entrepreneur by choice. I’ve had the freedom to build companies, make mistakes, take risks and occasionally wonder what on earth I was thinking. And I wouldn’t exchange that experience for another career. But I also know how much it demands.
AI is giving us extraordinary opportunities. It may allow people who never had the resources to start a business to give their ideas a chance. That is something worth celebrating. But I would be much less enthusiastic about a future in which people become entrepreneurs simply because nobody wants to employ them anymore.
Perhaps we should question our romantic idea of a world full of independent entrepreneurs. After all, who is going to work for all these businesses?
I don’t have an answer to what we should do about the changes ahead. Governments, employers and educational institutions will have to rethink how people prepare for work, change careers and support themselves. And the rest of us will have to learn to live with a little more uncertainty.
But I do know one thing. The real promise of AI should be to give us more choices, not fewer. Because freedom isn’t everyone becoming their own boss. Freedom is being able to choose whether you want to be one.